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Rating: 
Summary: A World Economy in the 1200s
Review: A completely convincing presentation of a world economic system before the surge of the West, in which Europe played only a minor part. Not as Marxist as Wallerstein, and not as over-the-top as Andre Gunner Frank's new book Re-Orient, which draws on it considerably. Her prose style does not scintillate, but neither is she difficult; reads like it grew out of her thesis. Because this is a big idea, and she explores it thoroughly, it's one of the most exciting books I have read in a long time.
Rating:
Summary: 'New World History' Classic
Review: Among teachers and students of world history, this book is already considered a classic. It is not so much a book about people, places, and events, as it is a book about processes and networks in a non-Eurocentric 13th century Old World. Welcome to a world whose hub is India. To the east Southeast Asian gold and spices and Chinese silks and porcelain. From the west come carpets, dye, incense, gold, silver, and slaves from the Persian Gulf and Red Sea - gold, ivory, and slaves from East Africa. To the north, the Mongols control Central Asia and the Silk Road that Marco Polo takes to China. However, much like "westernization" is sometimes used as a concept in modern history, this was a time of "southernization" in an Asia-centered world connected by monsoon winds. Way out on the periphery of an overlapping Mediterranean network lie Genoa and Venice. Indeed, if Europe were mentioned at this time, most literate people would think of Constantinople - not medieval Western Europe, but the postclassical Byzantine Empire. *Before European Hegemony* is obviously a 'not for everyone' history book. Nevertheless, the reason that I gave it 5 stars is because I consider it the most accessible 'world systems' history - and also because of the maps of overlapping trading networks which are probably known even better than the book. I can recommend the book to teachers (and students) of AP and college-survey world history courses without hesitation, or any reader whose tastes run to historical scholarship.
Rating: 
Summary: Great book, but still one sided
Review: Dr. Abu Lughod's book is a great work of scholarship and a much needed addition to the "New Histories" being written that show the history as it really happened. Still, as Gunder Frank mentions in his review of this book, Abu Lughod misses one point in her survey. She sees the world economy as a disconnected series of events, and much like Wallerstein, maintains the idea that world after 1500 hundred was not connected to the one before that date. She treats the Mongol trade network as an isolated world-system, instead of a period in the world system. This is a small flaw in the face of so many larger problems we have in current historiography. A great read, and I suggest you read it in conjunction with ReOrient, The Colonizers' Model of the World, and World System History.
Rating:
Summary: Great book, but still one sided
Review: Dr. Abu Lughod's book is a great work of scholarship and a much needed addition to the "New Histories" being written that show the history as it really happened. Still, as Gunder Frank mentions in his review of this book, Abu Lughod misses one point in her survey. She sees the world economy as a disconnected series of events, and much like Wallerstein, maintains the idea that world after 1500 hundred was not connected to the one before that date. She treats the Mongol trade network as an isolated world-system, instead of a period in the world system. This is a small flaw in the face of so many larger problems we have in current historiography. A great read, and I suggest you read it in conjunction with ReOrient, The Colonizers' Model of the World, and World System History.
Rating:
Summary: Great book, but still one sided
Review: Dr. Abu Lughod's book is a great work of scholarship and a much needed addition to the "New Histories" being written that show the history as it really happened. Still, as Gunder Frank mentions in his review of this book, Abu Lughod misses one point in her survey. She sees the world economy as a disconnected series of events, and much like Wallerstein, maintains the idea that world after 1500 hundred was not connected to the one before that date. She treats the Mongol trade network as an isolated world-system, instead of a period in the world system. This is a small flaw in the face of so many larger problems we have in current historiography. A great read, and I suggest you read it in conjunction with ReOrient, The Colonizers' Model of the World, and World System History.
Rating:
Summary: Continuity in global connections -- the rest of the history
Review: In much the same way that Eric Wolf shows the world before European conquest in his book titled Europe and the People Without History starting in 1400, Abu-Lughod begins before the European trade routes by ship. She traces the cross-continent trade routes of India, China and the Mediterranean. By looking back to these early systems of trade, Abu-Lughod shows how ideas, foods, language and people were transported between regions of the earth long before colonialism took hold. By looking at movements of people and ideas before Europe's world domination, Abu-Lughod is able to take a new look at the future - a perspective that does not seem as deterministic as other historic views. Europe was not necessarily "destined" to become the greatest region on the planet and it need not be in the future.
This new look at history provides a wider framework from which to understand the current era. While it is true that computer technology and the spread of the Internet has been facilitated predominately by English-speaking programmers and subsequently English-based programs, this might not be the wave of the future. Looking at how vast regions of the planet interacted centuries ago provides a better base from which to understand how they might interact in the future. The people from the same geo-political regions that Abu-Lughod describes in her book are now "commuting" or "traveling" and conversing via electronic media. How will the new instrument of communication change the way these people share time and space?
Rating:
Summary: A landmark of the "new" economic history
Review: There are few books in the field of economic history that I'd say are both landmarks and enjoyable to read. Assuming the reader has a great interest in history, Before European Hegemony is certainly one of them. Abu-Lughod's excellent world systems survey details the inter-connections between pre-modern economies and societies of the era. There is also the sense of continuity between these pre-modern economic relationships and the modern era. Special mention should be made of the fact that Before European Hegemony was one of the first of a new wave of economic, historical and sociological studies that de-emphasized the eurocentric histories that came before them. Guilty of the same simplistic approaches the eurocentric histories were charged with, for example giving the only reason for the rise of the West as military might, much of what followed Before European Hegemony was, in a word, garbage. Not so, this groundbreaking study. Well researched, well written and highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Provocative
Review: This book is approaching the status of a classic. While a work of history, the author is not a historian but rather a sociologist with an interest in the role of cities. Perhaps because she was a disciplinary outsider not specializing in a given historical period, as well as being used to comparative analysis, Abu-Lughod adopted a cross-cultural approach. The starting point for this book was the prevailing belief that a world economy was created by Europeans in the early modern period. More naive interpretations saw this as a logical development of European capitalism and that capitalism was unique to Europe. A major point of this book is that a world economic system, spanning all of Eurasia and including Southeast Asia and Eastern Africa existed prior to the early modern period. This world system was based on pre-existing regional trade networks in the Eastern Mediterrenean, the Indian Ocean, Central Asia, and China. Some of these linkages, like the famous Silk road across Central Asia and trade across the Indian Ocean, were ancient.
Abu-Lughod reconstructs a true world economy stretching from western Europe to China reaching its peak during the 13th and 14th centuries and then declining. She shows that Europe joined this system relatively late and was a smaller component of these large trade networks. The peak of this world system is associated with the Mongol conquest of Central Asia and China. Mongol successes are seen as simultaneously making trade across Central Asia, the northern axis of the world system, and trade through the Indian Ocean and south China, the southern axis, more efficient. This lead to a Eurasian boom. As a corollary, Abu-Lughod explores the richly capitalist nature of trade in the Muslim, Indian, and Chinese regions making up the world system. Some of the institutional innovations attributed to Medieval and Renaissance European merchants may have been borrowed from the Muslim world.
If the Mongols were the inadvertant architects of this system, they were also the inadvertant cause of its collapse. The key event is the Black Death, a Eurasian pandemic which probably originated in central Asia and was spread by Mongol armies and trade made possible by their states. The resulting depopulations and political instability, including the Ming expulsion of the Mongol from China, crippled the Medieval world system, though it left intact regional trade networks, particularly in Asia that the Europeans would join and come to dominate in the Early Modern period.
A final and more controversial point made by Abu-Lughod is that the success of Europeans in subsequently reconstructing and dominating, in an unprecedented way, the Eurasian trade system was the withdrawal of the Chinese state from interest in trade. Under the later Ming, the powerful Chinese navy was dissolved and trade through southern China ceased to be an important issue for the Chinese state. The subsequent power vacuum made European domination possible. This may not be entirely correct but is argued well.
This book has become the point of departure for much subsequent important work in world history. It is well written and has a nice bibliography.
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